The Power of the Other

Greetings, Gateway.

It's so good to be here.

I I love this place and I love the ripples that y'all have all literally all over the world.

It's just give yourselves a hand.

Seriously.

You guys, because I I travel around out there and and you you're just affecting people everywhere.

So it's really, really cool what God's done here.

So this is the beginning of a series, and all glad all of y'all showed up.

Want to say hi to the people in the other campuses and the overflows.

And glad that you're here because this is the beginning of a series about the power of prayer.

And this morning, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about one of the most difficult things that happens in our prayer lives.

And that is when we're asking God, do something, change this part of my life, change me.

And the most, they've done research and the most often prayed prayer itself.

Y'all know what it is?

God fix him.

Now, when we're praying these prayers, and sometimes we're waiting on God to zap the situation, right?

I remember when when I was in college and got got depressed, and I was there in my dorm room one day, and I picked up the Bible and I was praying about all these areas of life.

And I opened up the Bible and said, seek first the kingdom of God, and all these areas will you know be added unto you.

So I walked across campus and I said, Well, I'm gonna look for God.

This is the first time, really.

And I I went down to the altar and I said, God, if you're there, help me.

And I'm depressed, and you know, and I'd seen on TV, you know, people get zapped.

Right?

When you go down the altar and you get zapped and God answers prayer and nothing happened.

And so I said, Well, call me.

And so I went back to my dorm room and the phone rang.

And I thought better pick that up.

And so a fraternity brother of mine invited me to a Bible study.

He said, I don't know why I thought of you, but I just thought of you, and I want to invite you to this Bible study.

And I went there and I told the leader that I'm really, really depressed and things aren't working out in life, and I asked God to zap me and he didn't zap me.

He said, Well, sometimes God uses people too.

So I want you to come to this group and want you to join us, and we're gonna walk through learning about God and the spiritual life and all that.

He said, I said, but I've been asking God to answer my prayer and zap me.

He said, but but God uses people too.

And I said, Well, that's a cop out.

I mean, that's like going, that's like like the nosebleed seat, said that's like plan B or something.

I want the real thing.

Long story short, God did change my life through, he did some zapping, but he also did some incredible growth through other people.

And that pastor was right.

And then one day I looked in Ephesians and it says that the whole body, meaning us all together, it says the whole body heals itself as each part does its work.

And further, I read in the scriptures, and what it said was, like in 1 Peter 4, it says, when we're loving each other and helping each other, using our gifts with each other, that that is God administering his grace in its various forms.

So I had to learn early on that God zaps us and he does miracles, and I've seen that.

And I've literally had him come into my room and visit me and say things.

Now I'm a psychologist, I can't say that out loud, they'll put me in a hospital, but but no, I have heard that.

He's spoken.

But most of the time, what I find is that this plan A that God has involves his people.

Because it's hard for us to do stuff on our own.

You know, how many of you have got any issues?

You do?

Okay.

Who does not have any issues?

Anybody here got it all together?

You don't have any issues?

Come on, there's got to be one of you victory and Jesus types that thinks you've got to.

Come on, where are you?

There's a because I always ask that person to stand.

Because it's important for the rest of us to see what denial looks like, right?

So here's the deal.

We all have issues, right?

I mean, I've got them too.

One of mine is, you know, I travel a lot, and so I get off my routine, and when I'm on the road and I come in late, and I'll binge on, you know, 14 large pizzas or something, and I start to get fat whenever I'm on the road in, you know, successive weeks or something.

And so I went through this period where I was getting fatter and fatter and fatter, and I'm going, well, I gotta get back on my program, I gotta get back on it, I gotta get back, I'm gonna do this, and I'm motivated, I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna, and then I wasn't doing it.

And then I was reading one of those stupid books that I write, and what it said, it said this right in the book.

It said, it said, if you're gonna do something and you tell yourself you're gonna you're gonna do it and you want to do it, and you're not doing it, you're not gonna do it.

It said that right in the book.

And then I kept reading, it says, What you gotta do is you gotta reach outside yourself and get some help.

So I call the the gym and I got a trainer, and they assigned me this young, mean, skinny woman.

And so I show up at six in the morning, she's working me from the first day, and then I go back and I go back and I go back, and I'm back on the pro.

I'm so proud of myself, I'm so disciplined now, I'm going.

And for a long time, my wife says about three weeks, but I was like, really, really, really into it.

And about in week three, I realized right in the middle, she's I can she got this bar and she's making me whatever a core is.

I'm supposed to be working on that.

And all of a sudden I stopped and I looked at her and I said, Oh no.

She said, What?

And I said, We forgot to take the before pictures.

She looks at me and says, Oh, we still can.

Do you ever feel like that with your issues, right?

God, I've been praying for a long time and still take the before pictures.

What the scripture tells us, and what I've experienced and I've seen countless times, with CEOs and boards, with support groups and neighborhood Bible studies, with individuals and families, is it exactly what the Bible says?

That sometimes it's exactly what Paul said in the New Testament, where in 1 Corinthians he's talking about all these struggles that he's going through.

He's asking God, you know, and and and leaning on God as obviously he did, and he said he was depressed.

Paul, the apostle that did all these incredible things.

He was going through all this, and there's what it says it says, God who comforts the depressed sent Titus to me.

Let me say that again.

There's a verse up there.

But God, who comforts the depressed, sent Titus to me, and we were refreshed by the coming of Titus.

Titus was his friend.

We look at that, and here's a man that saw God do incredible zappings.

But in this particular arena, he needed what I like to call the power of the other.

And it's the power that God puts in us through his gifts to help each other.

And it's a mystery, but today we're gonna unpack a little bit about how that works.

So, how many of you um have ever seen any kind of uh Navy SEAL movie or heard them talk about what they do or anything?

Okay, these guys are amazing.

They're just amazing, right?

Well, I when I grew up, I had two older sisters who used to beat me up all the time.

And I always prayed for an older brother.

Now that's a dumb prayer, right?

Because how are you gonna, I mean, you pray for a brother, he's probably gonna be younger than you, but anyway, I always wanted an older brother, and I never got one until I did.

I got a Navy SEAL.

He wasn't older, he was younger, but I finally got my brother, and I got a Navy SEAL.

When you wanted a brother for your whole life and you get a Navy SEAL, I mean you've won the lottery.

And I got my brother through my brother-in-law, Mark.

And Mark, I used to love to hear Mark's stories.

I'd say, Mark, tell me, you know, he'd come back from somewhere and he couldn't tell me where because he'd have to kill me, but he I'd say, just tell me a story.

And he goes, Well, we're up in the in the plains at 40,000 feet, and and we jumped out full scuba gear, go through the oxygen level, hit the cold ocean, go to the bottom.

We took a little nap because we've been up for three days, bottom of the ocean, changed gear, went up and boarded one of Saddam Hussein's ships, and took it down, turned it around, took it back to the holding tank, and then had lunch.

They're crazy.

They're amazing.

But you know, they're not born that way, they go through this training and this development, and they're amazing.

And Mark was an incredible uh brother and friend and father and husband and American, and we lost him in Iraq in 08.

And it was just a devastating blow for us and the family.

But I learned something about these seals, they know the power of the other.

Because as soon as it happened, they started to descend on the family, and they hung out with us, and we all went through that together, and we grieved together.

But I'd be sitting around with these seals, and we'd tell Mark stories that week as we cried, and then we'd tell a Mark's story, and then we'd cry more.

And one of them told me the story that relates to us this morning, and I'll call him Bryce.

It's not his real name, but he was in training with Mark, and when they become seals, if you've ever heard of Hell Week, it's the last part of one of the last parts of their training where you know start out thousands of the best specimens in the world are trying to become seals, it gets down to hundreds, and then they finally get down to 200 of the best of the best.

They take them through this week called Hell Week, where they literally break them, and there's about 20 or 25 left at the end of the week who didn't who didn't ring the bell and say, I'm done.

And they become seals.

And they take them out in the ocean off uh of San Diego and put them in hypothermia situations for hours and days, and and they got to pull barges out there and and just literally trying to break the system to see who can make it.

Well, the last part of this apparently is a long swim, or towards the last part, is this long swim.

And Bryce told me that he and Mark had been assigned as buddies through the training, and they had this this great connection.

And Mark had made it to the shore, and if you make it to the shore, you've passed on the last swim.

And Bryce said he's doing the swim and he's probably 50 yards, 100 yards from the end.

He said, literally, his body stopped.

He said he couldn't move.

He was trying to will it, he was trying to do everything.

He said, I'm going down.

My body just would not go anymore.

It was done.

You ever had that feeling?

You ever been in the gym?

And I went once and you pick up a weight and you go long enough and it won't go anymore.

Well, he was done.

He said, He starts to go down.

He knows he's going to drown if he doesn't get help.

He said, He's starting to sink, and he looks up on the shore, and Mark's standing on the shore, and he looks up and he said, our eyes caught, and Mark looked at me, and I'm in the water, and Mark looks at me and goes, Go! He said, I don't know how to explain it.

He said, But my body came out of the water and made it to the shore.

What is that?

What is that?

He was trying with his will and his willpower and everything he had.

But what is that than an immaterial, invisible connection between two people?

Invisible, immaterial, this thing called relationship, that it changes the physical material world.

His body operated differently, his brain operated differently.

What is that?

Well, philosophers and neurobiologists and physicists and doctors and everybody has struggled with this question for a long time, and we know a lot more about how it works now.

But ultimately, it's such a mystery.

This spiritual and physical and immaterial and material world that God has created.

Well, we know how it happened.

You go back to Genesis, and there was a spirit, God, who is invisible, and he spoke all of this into reality.

And ever since then, the spiritual and this reality have always existed together.

And part of that is relationship and how it molds us and shapes us.

And a lot of times we're asking God to heal this area of life, and He wants to, but He wants to send Titus to us.

He wants to send Bryce to us.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the science of this and some of the theology of it.

You know, I'm a psychologist.

Turn to the person you came with, said, you know, look them in the eye.

I know you've always wanted to say this to them, right?

You whoever you came with this morning, look them in the eye and say, you need to see a psychologist.

He's up there, so listen.

All right.

How many of you have flown lately on an airplane?

What's the first thing you did when you landed?

Turn your cell phone on, right?

Yeah.

If you're a guy, you turn it on before you landed.

When you turn it on, what happened?

Up in the left-hand corner, it says searching.

Why is that?

It's searching for a connection.

You know why that is?

Because there's a chip built inside that phone that as soon as you turn it on, it searches for a connection outside itself because it needs that network to get past its limit.

And that's what we're looking for in life, in business, in relationships, and marriage, and all of this.

We've hit some limit.

We're trying to get to the next level.

And that phone has got to connect to the network, it's got to download what the network has for it to be able to perform.

That's what happened to Bryce.

But it happens to all of us.

You know that when a baby is born, how many of you ladies have had babies?

How many of you had this experience?

After your the seconds after your baby's born, that baby turned to you and said, Mom, was that hard on you?

I'm so sorry.

And looks around, it's a mess around here.

Let me clean up.

Why don't you go get a massage?

That baby didn't say that, right?

That had to be downloaded through relationship.

And here's what we know about babies this this connection and the physical and the psychological and the emotional and the intellectual.

You take a baby and you feed and water them.

But if they're not loved, their brain sizes are smaller, their immune system doesn't work, they can have failure to thrive syndrome.

We have babies who are born in institutions and they're not picked up and they're not bonded with, but they're fed and watered.

And you take them all the way through, and they get, you know, get to be an adolescent, and they start to act out and have all sorts of behavior problems.

You can take pictures of their brains, and there's wiring that's missing that didn't happen because of the connection that wasn't there.

Just like their brain sizes are smaller.

And you know what?

It's not just babies, it's you and me, and it's all the way to the end of the life.

It's from the womb to the tomb.

We need this thing called connection.

Geriatrics who have heart attack and stroke, give them the best medical care possible.

And you put one group in support groups where they're processing their pain and they're going through stuff together.

And you have another group that has the best medical care and doesn't have that support, and group two has way more second heart attacks and strokes.

This is just how God has made us.

So you're like a cell phone.

What I want to do is I want to give you a little bit of a map so you can find your network.

Have y'all seen that new ad with the Can You Hear Me Now guy?

He switched.

That was, I don't know who did that, but that was brilliant.

Okay.

Anyway, it's a different story.

I'm going to give you a map so you can find your network.

Alright.

Any questions?

Okay, now this is the universe.

All right?

And here's what happens: you're that cell phone.

And from the second you came into this world, you've been searching for a connection.

If we had a video, your birth, here's what you did.

You came out and you went, we're searching for connection.

Okay?

You singles know what I'm talking about, right?

You're out there searching.

I'm kidding.

Okay, so that's what we do in life.

Now, here's the deal.

Not everybody knows that they're doing that.

Because sometimes people have gone through things and there wasn't anybody available, and they became the network to themselves.

They try to meet all their own needs.

But everybody's searching for a connection.

Now, here's what happens.

I want you to understand something about the universe.

There are only four possibilities of where you can be in any moment in this universe where God has put us.

And in this whole universe, remember, you're always searching for a connection.

You're like that phone.

You're looking.

Your heart is looking for what it needs.

But here's what happens.

When you take the GPS reading, have you ever gone and sat with a friend and you sit down in the restaurant and they say, So, where are you?

Well, I'm in the restaurant, you idiot.

No.

But what they're asking is, where are you inside?

See, that's the GPS.

Where are you?

And I want to ask you today, where are you in your life?

Because there's only four places we can be.

Number one is we can be in the corner where there's no connection.

And we're emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, whatever way, whatever it is our need is, we're in a corner where we're not connecting with anybody and we're not connecting with God.

Or maybe we're connecting with God like Paul was, but there's no Titus.

And a lot of people will try to live and function in all areas of life from this corner one where there's no connection.

Now they may have people around them.

I've seen executive teams of high performers, but something's wrong in the business, and you get into that board or that executive team, or you get into a family, or you get into a marriage, or you have the couple in the room.

Oh, there's somebody in the room with them, but there's no connection.

Because of woundedness, because of whatever it is, defensiveness, hurt, pride, all this stuff.

What happens is we might have bodies around us, but we're alone in that relationship.

And we start to have symptoms.

Like it loses its meaning, it loses its joy, it loses its energy, start to get depressed.

And that's a crummy place to live.

Crummy place to live.

Especially when somebody's around.

It's like the old George Thorogood song.

He said, When I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself.

Think about that sentence.

And see, sometimes people are with some people, but there's no connection and they're alone.

Well, that's not very good.

So we'll go over to corner two, and that's the corner I'm gonna call a bad connection.

And a bad connection might, it may be abusive, but it may not be.

It may be very nice.

But a bad connection, the nature of the connection is this that you end up feeling bad about yourself in some way.

You're not good enough.

You're inferior.

There's some expectation that you just can't ever meet.

And in that connection, no matter how hard you try, you end up experiencing there's a lot of different words for it, but it's shame or guilt or inferiority or badness.

And I just wish I could be better in some way.

But you never can't quite get there.

Well, that doesn't feel good.

Anybody ever felt that before?

You've been had a parent or a boss or Somebody where it just can't be good enough for them.

Well, that doesn't feel good, so what do we do?

We go, I don't want to hang out with him anymore.

So we go back to corner one.

Some people do this with God.

They realize I have no meaning in life, I'm looking for God.

So they go to church, but they go to a church of bad connection.

Because it's one of those churches that all they do is preach, you know, guilt and how they have a three-point sermon every week.

God's good, you're bad, try harder.

That's not the Bible.

But that's what we think it is.

So then they go, I'm not going to church anymore.

Go back over here.

But then this is crummy.

I mean, this is like isolation or shame.

Who wants to live there?

Is there a better option?

Well, how about corner three?

I'm gonna go down here.

And corner three is the fake good connection.

In other words, it's a pseudo-good.

It feels good.

We go to corner three because we want to feel good, so we medicate ourselves.

Now I say fake because it feels good, but it only feels good for a minute because it's like a sugar high.

In fact, some people's corner three is a sugar high.

I heard a Christian speaker, a woman say one time, she got on stage, said she had to, she confessed that she was having an affair with two men, Ben and Jerry.

Say, there's a lot of ways to go to corner three.

Sometimes it is an illicit relationship.

Sometimes it's a substance.

Sometimes it's a porn addiction.

Sometimes for high performers, it's next quarter's numbers.

Or driving sales or driving people or driving your kid to better grades or the next trophy or whatever it is.

But something that's gonna make me feel good, the problem is it makes me feel good for a minute.

And if Bryce had been drowning, Mark could have thrown him a trophy.

That wasn't gonna do it, because it only lasts for a minute.

What we need is we need corner four.

And that's real connection.

Because that's where we get fueled.

So I want you to ask yourself, and by the way, these are not static.

In other words, your whole life, my whole life is not gonna be here or here or here.

See, we're dynamic creatures.

And we can go, we can go to, we can go in the period of a day.

We can go through, I can I can do this when I'm speaking to you, right?

Because I need to know, are y'all with me?

Ah, good, we're connecting.

All right.

But I tell you, I've I've been speaking before, and I'm I'm out there and I'm all excited.

I go, we got to talk about God and life, we're gonna make this better.

And and then it's like they're looking at me like this, you know.

I go, Oh, I'm not connecting.

Of course I'm not connecting.

I suck.

I'm awful, I'm bad, I'm not, I should have said that line better, or you know, whatever.

I got the denomination wrong, or I I could have done it.

Why didn't I prepare?

And I'll be glad when this thing is over so I can go binge.

And that can happen in a millisecond.

But see, what God tells us is wherever you are in your life in any day, I want you to pull out your GPS and say, wait a minute, what's going on with me?

I need some help.

I need to reach out to God or to somebody.

I need Titus.

See, you don't have to go this way like a European roundabout.

You can go from any of these corners down to corner four at any time.

God says if we own our vulnerability and say, I need some help, and that's how work teams ought to look like, and that's how business partnerships ought to look like.

And instead of couples criticizing each other, they ought to be able to turn to each other and say, I'm not doing well in this area, I'm failing you.

Help me, or I need some help.

But see, that requires for us to go through this doorway, and we won't open up the door sometimes because it's too hard, it's too painful.

A few years ago, uh well-known, a world-class surgeon who on the East Coast, you know, medical centers run on his name, and and just a phenomenal guy.

He called me and said, somebody referred him to me, and he said, I want to fly to LA and spend a day with you.

Um I got an issue.

And so he came out, and his issue was this.

For a number of years he had been having affairs uh pretty much with every nurse in the hospital, administrators and everybody else, and and he just so many women in his trail.

And his wife, he got he got caught, and his wife was willing to put it back together, so he flies out and he says, he says, Okay, so I got a plan.

I want you to listen to my plan and tell me what you think.

So I listened to his plan.

It was a great plan, a lot of great things in it.

But he said, you know, I'm gonna start meeting my wife's needs.

We're gonna go on a walk every night before bedtime.

I'm gonna pray with her, I'm gonna do my spiritual disciplines, I'm gonna read, you know, more of the Bible and all this kind of stuff.

And as he's sitting there describing this plan, I'm getting more and more depressed.

And he said, What do you think?

And I said, Well, you're headed for a second heart attack.

He said, What are you talking about?

I said, Because everything you said, that whole plan, it's guaranteed to fail.

He said, Why?

I said, Because it all depends on you.

It's all output.

You're gonna try harder.

You've been trying a long time.

And see, what happened is you ran out and you needed some fueling, and you ran out, so you went and found that fueling, but you found it over here, and that never gets to the heart.

I said, Let me tell you something about the human heart.

And this is a world-class heart surgeon, right?

He looks at me and goes, Okay, tell me something about the heart.

I said, It's got a couple pipes coming in, a couple pipes going out, right?

And your pipes coming in are clogged.

I said, Where did you learn that it all depended on you and you couldn't take anything from the outside?

He sat there and it sort of like guide him a little bit, and he looks up and he says, You know, I just remembered a night.

Maybe this has something to do with it.

And he talked about when he was in the tenth grade and he had three or four younger siblings.

He was in the tenth grade.

His father was an alcoholic who they took off to rehab one night, and his mother broke down, and she went to a psychiatric hospital for a year.

And he was on his own with four little brothers and sisters, and he said, I remember walking out in the yard and saying, Well, I guess it all depends on me now.

And I took care of him.

He said, and then I went to pre-med and then medical school and all of that.

Then I got into residency, and then I've been at it, and this wheel's been grinding ever since.

I guess that's what you're talking about.

I said, It is.

So we did a different program and we redesigned the program.

Certainly he was gonna do the stuff for his wife he talked about, but we got him down here and got him in a group, and I got him with a couple sponsors, and I got him with a good counselor and a support.

And this is a world-class surgeon doing a gazillion surgeries a week, and we say we don't have time for all that, right?

He was investing 12 hours a week in different corner four experiences where he was opening up and starting to process things and let Titus come to him.

He calls me a year later.

He says, I want to come see you, and this time I'm gonna bring my wife.

And they came and they finally had the relationship that they had always wanted, and he was doing great, but he was still plugged into corner four.

See, that's how God designed us.

Ephesians 4 says, it's not always zapping, it's about this body.

He'll answer our prayers, and he answers our prayers through each other.

I remember a number of years ago, I had this big business calamity.

And I'd hired a guy to run a company owned, and he really screwed it up, and I found out we're in deep, deep trouble.

And it's end of the year, and he comes in and said we need a big cash infusion.

I he had been telling me we were he was gonna start, you know, dispersing money.

Like I thought he was gonna write me checks.

Now he wants me to write him one.

So I get further into this and I find out we are deeply, deeply in trouble that he hadn't told me about.

And the cash burn was so big, and I'm playing this out, and this is not good.

And I went home, I was out on my patio, and I was here in a bad way.

How could I have done this?

How could I have screwed this up?

How could I, why did I, why didn't I look further into his, why didn't I give more oversight?

What I should have, all this kind of stuff.

And I just, I did not see any way out.

And I'm asking God and I'm praying, and I didn't see any way out, and I just knew it was over.

The phone rings, it sounds like a theme in my life, right?

The phone rings, this is before caller ID, because I would not have answered it had I known who it was.

It was my main mentor in life, a man that 20 years older than me, that it sort of adopted me out of graduate school and poured into me, taught me everything I know about business.

He said, So how's it going?

Last person I want to talk to.

It's like I'm failing.

I made a big screw up, everything he's ever touched turned to gold.

I said, Not so well.

And he said, Well, what's up?

And I told him the story, and I'm sitting there waiting for him to say, You idiot, how could you?

And I'm sitting there and I tell the story and I said, Well, that's what's it.

And I stop and the phone's silent for a moment.

And here's what he says.

He goes, Well, we've all been there.

We?

I said, We?

You?

You've been there?

He goes, Oh yeah.

He said, I've made that mistake.

He said, anybody's ever built anything has made that mistake.

I said, which one?

I got a lot of.

He says, you hired the wrong guy.

You didn't do your due diligence.

You put the wrong guy in there.

Everybody's anybody's ever made built anything has made that mistake.

He said, but once you do it once, you'll never do it again.

He said, tell me more about it.

And he went in the story and I started explaining it.

And we and I'm processing all this.

And here's what happens.

I get to the end of that call after about an hour.

And I'm telling you, I was a different human.

I was Bryce going down, and there's no way I could have put that thing, I didn't know what I was gonna do.

But at the end of that hour, I was, in Paul's words, refreshed by Titus.

And what happened was, and now I know this from neuroscience, my brain had changed.

There was wiring happening, there were different chemicals flowing through me at the neurotransmitter level.

I needed a big cash infusion, I didn't have it yet.

I needed a plan, I didn't have it yet.

I needed better ideas, I didn't have it yet at the end of that call.

I didn't have anything I needed, but I knew I can do this.

And with God's help, we're gonna fix this and we're gonna turn this thing around.

And I woke up the next morning and I went and attacked it, and it took about a year, and God rescued it.

And exceedingly abundantly more than anything I could have ever dreamed, as the verse says.

But it wouldn't have happened.

It wouldn't have happened without Titus.

So I'll close with this.

None of us is a self-made person.

It's the biggest oxymoron ever.

And if you hear people say, well, I'm a self-made man.

No, you're not.

Self-made, or worse than that, self-help.

People say, you write self-help books.

I go, no, there's no such thing as self-help.

That's the biggest oxym.

Y'all know what an oxymoron is?

Like two words that don't go together, like you know, Microsoft works.

You that you just can't.

Self-help.

There's no such thing.

If you think you're the source to yourself, then hold your breath.

We can wait on you.

You'll bend the knee.

Because ultimately we need life to come to us from the outside.

And Jesus Christ came to the earth because we were stuck in these three corners.

We were cut off, separated from life, and we all hit our limits.

Or we were wallowing in guilt and shame and not good enough.

Or we were trying to escape all that by medicating ourselves in some way.

And Jesus comes to you this morning, and what he says is, come home.

Doesn't matter where you are, just come home.

And we have the only faith in the world.

Go look at all of them.

We have the only one in the world that matches reality.

It's the only one in the world that can answer that question of how does something invisible affect the visible life?

Because God is a spirit and he has breathed invisible life into each of us, and none of us is the creator.

We are dependent on the outside.

And he says that's in two ways directly with him and with each other.

And if we're amputated from either one of those, we're not running on all cylinders.

So here's my prayer for you.

Open this door.

If you're isolated or you're ashamed or guilty or you're still running around trying to feel better, go through this door and come to corner four.

Say, God, call me.

I need your help.

And then when the phone rings, or you pick up the phone better yet, and you call somebody.

Come to one of the groups here or something and say, God, I need you.

And I promise you, He will show up.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you that you haven't just the simplest way I know to say this, God, is you haven't left us in those three corners.

That you see us where we are.

And God, we want to start by lifting up your name and thank you for coming to us when we're not even opening the door, we're not even aware there is a door.

And God, I pray that every person here throughout every day that we can realize whenever we're alone, whenever we're feeling bad, or whenever we're tempted to go try to feel better in a way that's not going to help us.

God, remind us to open the door to you and to one of your people.

I pray this morning, God, that you will melt doorknobs inside of hearts that have been afraid and reach inside and call us home to you in Jesus' name.

Amen.